Born Savages - Cora Brent Page 0,9
people. They suffered a turbulent marriage punctuated by infidelity, alcoholism and the birth of three children. Maybe that’s why they never smiled for photographs.
Charles was hit by a taxi in 1952 while jaywalking. He died in the gutter of Hollywood Boulevard amid a throng of curious onlookers. He might not have minded. Reportedly Charles loved nothing more than a rapt audience.
Mary on the other hand hung around for more years than most human beings do, long enough to meet her grandchildren and great-grandchildren. My parents dragged us to the nursing home in Pasadena a few times to pay homage. I remember her as a miniature ancient woman who wore a wig of absurd blond ringlets. She yelled all the time, screeching “Get off my stage!” if you walked too close. I was nine when she finally died. A series of reporters came around to talk about her but no one was sad. After all, she was ridiculously old and her mind had been gone for decades.
My grandfather, Rex, was among the next generation of Savages. His older sisters, Anne and Joan, were more celebrated for their lifetime feud with one another than for their films. They traded husbands and lovers and publicly ridiculed each other, much to the delight of the fledgling tabloid industry.
Joan inherited her mother’s longevity and is still alive – broke and reclusive and living somewhere off the rocky coast of Oregon. Every once in a while her name will be trending on the search engines when a bored reporter seeks her out for an interview about places long gone and people long dead. Even in the twilight of her life she’s still obsessed with her dead (“That pasty witch was ALWAYS jealous of me!”) older sister.
Rex Savage, my grandfather, was the golden boy of his era. Tall, dark-haired and powerfully built, he was full of testosterone and charisma. An incorrigible ladies’ man who starred in a long line of pictures with names like Desperado Gunslinger and Cowboys on the Horizon, he was the archetypal Hollywood movie star and Hollywood was more than happy to have him. Sometimes when I catch a glimpse of one of his film stills I can’t help but do a double take because he looks so much like my brother Montgomery, right down to the curled-lip sneer. It’s fucking uncanny.
Rex met his match in a fiery Irish starlet named Margaret O’Leary. She was his costar in the 1951 hit western Desert Honor. It’s a rather ho-hum movie about a reformed desperado who shoots a bunch of leather-faced bad guys, adopts two orphans and marries the local schoolteacher. It wound up being the only project they ever worked on together but it was enough.
There was a bad kind of chemistry between the two of them. For a decade they married and fought and split and reconciled over and over, somehow creating two troubled children and a legacy of dysfunction. They had just remarried for the fourth time in 1961 when Margaret was killed in a plane crash during a blizzard in the Sierra Nevada mountains.
Rex was inconsolable. In fact he kind of pitched off the deep end. I guess it’s possible he would have turned into a blithering joke anyway, but to hear it told, the tragic loss of his wife and the upheaval of his film career had a lot to do with the downward spiral. His later interviews show a baffled old man with tangled nose hair droning on about how in the year 1965 he’d been abducted by aliens while stargazing at the Griffith Observatory.
Then came a morning when Rex decided it was a good idea wander around his wealthy neighborhood drunk as a frat pledge. He fell into a swimming pool and drowned, wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts and a crucifix.
It was rather an ignoble end for a leading man. Everyone says so.
Margaret’s films are the only ones I’ll sit down and watch if I happen to be flipping channels and catch a glimpse of her brilliant red hair in a midcentury Technicolor world. My two sisters won the genetic lottery that gave them the same coloring, although Ava has been dying hers blonde since she was a teenager.
Not me though. Like my two brothers I inherited the wavy dark hair and near olive skin of Rex Savage.
Speaking of me, it’s a good thing Rex and Margaret paused their marital wars long enough to produce a daughter, Mina, and a son, August.
An unauthorized biography written shortly